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President-elect Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order on Monday that would guarantee that companies that helped TikTok stay in service would not be held liable for violating a ban passed by Congress.
TikTok suspended service this weekend ahead of a Sunday deadline that required ByteDance, the app’s Chinese owner, to sell the video app in order to avoid a ban on app stores allowing downloads.
“I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform on Sunday.
“I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security,” the president-elect said.
Trump added that his order would ensure that companies that helped TikTok stay in service would face “no liability”.
Earlier on Sunday, Mike Waltz, a Florida lawmaker who will become national security adviser when Trump is inaugurated on Monday, told CNN the president-elect would consider allowing continued Chinese ownership but with “firewalls” to ensure the app’s data was “protected here on US soil”.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that he would like the US “to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture”.
“By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say [sic] up,” Trump said. “Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars — maybe trillions.”
“My initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.”
Lawmakers and US security officials believe the Chinese government could use TikTok to obtain the personal information of Americans that would facilitate espionage. TikTok denies that China has any control over the app.
The Supreme Court on Friday upheld the ban, which took effect on Sunday. Trump on Saturday said he would “most likely” extend the deadline to sell TikTok, which has been downloaded by 170mn Americans, by 90 days.
But some Republican lawmakers, including Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, and Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts, said in a statement that there was “no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’”.
One person involved in drafting the TikTok law said there was no provision in the legislation for an extension once the January 19 deadline had passed.
The law did permit a 90-day extension if certain conditions were met — including evidence of “significant progress” towards a divestiture and “binding agreements” to enable execution — but only if they came before the deadline.
In a separate interview with CBS television, Waltz said Trump needed time to evaluate possible deals to save the app.
“What we need between now and Monday is to buy the president some time to evaluate those deals and if it goes dark that’s going to be obviously extremely problematic,” he said.
Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, told NBC he believed that when Trump said “save TikTok” the president-elect was referring to ways “to try to force along a true divestiture”.
In his first term, Trump issued an executive order to stop TikTok from operating in the US, but it was blocked by the courts. His administration also tried to engineer a deal that would ensure China could not access the data. China’s national security laws require Chinese companies to hand over data when so ordered by the government.
Trump last year expressed opposition to the congressional divest-or-ban law, saying it would help Facebook, which banned him from its platform for two years. Facebook competes with TikTok through its Instagram app.
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